July 14, 2011: China Day 4 - Beijing Zoo, Wang Fu Jing Street

July 14, 2011: Today's agenda was far less busy than those of the past few days. Xie and I met and walked to the Beijing Zoo which was only about two km away from my hotel. As usual we had to walk through the Black Bamboo Park to get there:

Exercising in Black Bamboo Park (Judo and Taikwando)

Birds for sale

The Beijing Zoo has many varieties of birds and monkeys for visitors to see, plus of course the pandas which were a big attraction.

Birds at Beijing Zoo

The zoo was fun to visit since many of the animals were active. And I'm glad that the sign below was posted so that nothing untoward happened to me:

However, we had to leave the zoo to go to an appointment at the Beijing branch office of the person who is my host in Shanghai. His company specializes in producing equipment for clean rooms and for hydroelectric power. The ladies who ran the office gave me a detailed presentation on their products. Very nicely presented. Then one of them took Xie and me out for lunch.

After a very nice lunch, Xie and I went to Wang Fu Jing Street, the primary street for shopping in Beijing. There were a couple very exclusive shopping malls that sold very high end products (e.g., Hermes, Cartier, Rolex, etc.) I also noticed that the department stores sold a very popular men's item (at least it's very popular in China) -- the "Man Bag". These bags are like square leather purses with hard sides and they hang on long straps. The leather is usually dark brown or black and it seemed that many men have them -- at least there were a lot of men carrying them n the subways and in the buses. Now if they could catch on in the US and Europe, I'm sure that some Man Bag company could do very well.

Department Store in  Beijing

The posters for the movie theater were also similar to ones we'd find in the US:

Movie theater in Beijing

This shopping mall was huge -- there were at least five large sections that comprise the mall. Across the street from the mall was a street of little shops and stalls that were quite colorful:

How'd you like to buy a stick of spiders:

After that, it was time to return to my hotel so that I could pack for my trip to Shanghai the next day. It was great to have spent time with Xie these past few days. We really got to talk about various topics that we had never discussed before -- differences between the political systems of China and the US and pluses and minuses of each, marriage, divorce, religion, Tibet, etc. I certainly hope that it won't take us 30 years to be able to meet each other next time -- just as I've said to all my friends that I've met on this trip. We'll see...